Marin author excavates obscure bits of local history

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“It Happened in Marin,” by San Rafael resident Jim Holden, includes the story of the 19th-century businesswoman Martha Buckelew. (Photo anonymous, courtesy of Jim Holden)

Jim Holden, author of “It Happened in Marin,” details links between the county and historical figures such as Kit Carson, Theodore Roosevelt and a grandson of Paul Revere. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

Holden’s book includes a chapter about Limantour Beach almost becoming a housing development. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

Ever hear of a place in Marin called the Big Empty? Probably not, since first-time author Jim Holden coined that name in his new book, “It Happened in Marin: True Stories from the Other Side of the Golden Gate” (Val de Grace Books, $25).

A 73-year-old retired real estate lawyer, Holden calls the Big Empty “a hiker’s dreamscape,” describing it as “Marin’s wildest, rawest, least touched area.” Walled in by the Bolinas and San Geronimo ridges, the rugged territory covers 10,000 rarely visited public acres, containing Pine Mountain, Marin’s third-tallest peak, and Kent Lake, the county’s largest reservoir. As Holden points out, you can drive to the Big Empty, but there are no public roads into it or through it.

“Hardly anybody goes there,” he said one recent morning, sitting at the kitchen table of his San Rafael home. “The name derives from my experience hiking there many times, but I didn’t find much in researching it.”

He found enough, though, to conclude that one of the Big Empty’s most spectacular natural features, Carson Falls, was owned circa the 1850s by Paul Revere’s grandson, Joseph Warren Revere, who named the falls and the creek that feeds it after the storied mountain man and scout Kit Carson, one of Revere’s heroes.

“I think this is the first time that anybody has determined that the creek and falls were really named after Kit Carson,” he said.

“William Kent really shaped the county,” he said, calling him “a giant in the preservation of Marin’s lands.” Against the wishes of his wife, Kent went into debt to buy Muir Woods for $45,000, saving its majestic redwoods from logging and commercial development. To the benefit of generations to come, he spearheaded the effort to preserve that natural cathedral as a national monument enjoyed by millions of visitors every year.

So why isn’t it named after him instead of John Muir, who had almost nothing to do with its preservation?

President Theodore Roosevelt wondered the same thing, writing Kent a letter saying, “I have great admiration for John Muir, but this is your gift and I should greatly like to name it Kent Monument if you will permit it.”

Kent wrote back, graciously turning down the offer. “I have five good, husky boys,” he told the president. “If these boys cannot keep the name of Kent alive, I am willing it should be forgotten.”

Martha Buckelew

Holden introduces us to a woman he calls “the astounding Martha Buckelew,” describing her as “a Marin trailblazer and the county’s first woman entrepreneur.” Until now, history has largely ignored her, Holden says, “because she was a woman in a man’s world.”

(If you’re wondering, she had nothing to do with the Marin charitable organization Buckelew Programs.)

In the 1860s, Holden tells us, Buckelew built a wharf on Agnes Island, a tiny spot of land at the end of the San Quentin Peninsula. The island no longer exists, filled in for the construction of the Marin onramp to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. But in 1870, a ferry service from Buckelew’s wharf became Marin’s first affordable commute to San Francisco.

Piecing together what he describes as “fragments of information from all over,” Holden paints a portrait of a savvy businesswoman who successfully fought off a challenge to her claim on the island by a better known and more well-connected male rival, James Ross, founder of the town of Ross.

“Ross threatened to drag Martha’s house into the bay unless she turned Agnes Island over to him,” Holden said, writing, “If Ross thought he could intimidate Martha Buckelew, he was seriously mistaken.”

Buckelew eventually outsmarted Ross, convincing the state to authorize her use of the island wharf for a ferry service for 20 years.

“She was shrewd,” Holden said as he looked at her stern, unsmiling photograph in his book. “And she looks like you wouldn’t want to do battle with her.”

‘The last place’

Beat poets and writers are colorful figures in Holden’s chapter “Mt. Tam and its Tales.” In the spring of 1956, the year before his career-making novel “On the Road” was published, Jack Kerouac moved into a cabin at the foot of Mount Tamalpais with poet Gary Snyder. In Kerouac’s novel “The Dharma Bums,” he calls Mount Tamalpais “as beautiful a mountain as you’ll see anywhere in the world.”

And, in a chapter on the Golden Gate Bridge, Holden credits beat poet Lew Welch’s 1969 poem “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings” for inspiring a landmark county government report that saved Marin from overdevelopment. He quotes Welch’s haunting refrain: “This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.”

“Lew Welch was the unofficial poet laureate of the mountain,” he said.

“It Happened in Marin” includes chapters on Angela Davis and the Marin courthouse killings, the rise and downfall of Synanon in West Marin, Point Reyes, Lagunitas Creek and the battle over the Buck Trust.

Holden, who raised two children in Marin with his wife Mary, writes with the authority of someone who has “lived in and roamed Marin County for 45 years,” as he says in his author’s notes, adding, “There is no place I would rather be.”

“I think the stories in the book are like companions as you tour around Marin,” he said. “They may make your experience a little richer.”